E3 is in full swing, and while Kyle and Sam are off taking their meetings, I stormed the Los Angeles Convention Center and made immediately toward Frontier Developments’ meeting room on the upper tier of the convention center. There, amid dim mood lighting and soft carpets, I got a chance to see what Frontier had to show off for E3—namely, Elite: Dangerous on the Xbox One.

Of course, as a card-carrying PC gamer, this didn’t excite me as much as it does Ars Automotive Editor Jonathan Gitlin (who is positively foaming to plug in his controller and blast off), but it is a big deal for the game—opening things up to an entirely new audience with entirely different expectations. Although the game just passed 500,000 active players (after its 1.0 release in December 2014), series creator David Braben recognizes that the console market represents a huge swath of potential new players.

Elite, Xbox One style

We spent several minutes on the Xbox version of Elite, and after getting my bearings it was a pretty easy transition to go from the Warthog HOTAS I usually play on to the Xbox’s controller. The controls have been collapsed so that every major flight system is available from the controller, either through direct button press or from holding down modifier buttons.

Unfortunately, the most immersive gameplay element of Elite—head tracking—won’t be available on the Xbox. We asked the Frontier devs if they had any intention of utilizing the Xbox’s Kinect to do facial recognition and head tracking (which on the PC enables players to open and close control panels simply by looking at them), and at least for now, there are no plans to do so.

Head tracking aside, the game played great. The graphics appeared to lack some of the high detail touches visible with maximum settings on a PC, but that’s to be expected—Elite: Dangerous is designed to look good even at 4k resolutions, and it’s going to be impossible to equal how good the game looks on a high-end PC. Still, at 1080p the game looked sharp and appeared to our eye to be running at a smooth 60 frames per second even in areas that on the PC are prone to some stuttering and lag (namely, within space stations).

Danger Close

Frontier has announced an arena combat-style game mode called “Close Quarters Combat,” or CQC—which will be a timed exclusive on the XBox One version of Elite: Dangerous. Braben and his team had no release dates for us—saying that CQC is coming “soon” for Xbox One and will be on PC “this year”—but we got to spend some time with the new game mode.

CQC takes place separate from the main game universe and is intended to be a quick join, quick action PvP matchmaking mode where players can jump and get immediately to action. To that end, players don’t play CQC with their own ships, but rather with a limited selection of four small ships: the Eagle, the Sidewinder, and the newly playable Federal Fighter (which executive producer Ben Dowie said was his favorite).

CQC matches are arena style, and we witnessed players fighting in and around a large space station. My first impression is that CQC shares some elements with Descent—the ships flew around and through the space station, zipping through cramped station utility conduits almost like the Millennium Falcon storming the Death Star. We saw a single capture-the-flag style game mode, with players flying around fighting over a “data sphere.” To match with the quick-twitch gameplay, the basic targeting mechanism has been changed so that losing line-of-sight on enemy ships breaks your targeting lock, as well.

Playing more CQC matches unlocks CQC-specific rewards like new equipment, and there will be a CQC leaderboard, but Frontier is very adamant that CQC won’t impinge on the main game—you won’t be able, for example, to earn monster weapons in CQC that are usable in the main game. They might offer non-gameplay-affecting rewards, like ship decals based on CQC skill, but some of the design details are still up in the air.

The timed exclusivity of CQC is going to leave a bad taste in some PC players’ mouths, especially those who have been with the project for years and contributed to Elite: Dangerous’ Kickstarter or alpha and beta phases. But designer David Braben sees CQC as an essential outreach to new console players who might at first be overwhelmed with the substantial Elite: Dangerous learning curve. “That kind of game play is not really intended for the PC player,” said Braben. “You want to switch on, play immediately, and switch off again… it’s a good way to bring the game to console, because we get a lot of attention for it. You’ve got to balance the fact that that audience wants something, and we will bring this to PC later.”

Elite plans

We then took the opportunity to hit David up with our entire list of questions about what’s coming next for Elite: Dangerous, and first on that list was whether there would be more free updates, or if next up are paid updates like the much-discussed planetary landings.

“There is more free stuff to come, but I don’t want to pre-announce what they are!” laughed Braben. “But, yes, there are paid things to come as well. I’m very, very excited about where we are.” Braben was unfortunately cagey on actual upcoming features we might see, but he did re-confirm that both the planetary landings and walk-around-the-ship mode were coming—and, importantly, that those features would come to PC first.

On that last point, Producer Ben Dowie reiterated that Xbox One and PC players won’t be playing head-to-head—although they’ll be playing in the same simulated universe, they’ll never encounter each other in space, likely because Microsoft’s Xbox patch cycle adds complexity to Frontier’s game update procedure. This means that PC players and Xbox players will often wind up on different clients, which means no head-to-head play. To that end, anticipated PC-centric features will likely land on PC first.

Enlarge/ Series creator David Braben in Frontier's demo suite at E3. There was lots of red lighting.

Speaking of anticipated features: we asked Braben where the rest of the promised ships were, since there are still multiple announced-but-unreleased ships like the Panther Clipper and the Federal Corvette. “There are more to come,” Braben said slowly, “and we haven’t announced when those will be, but they are in plan.”

“Are there any ships that haven’t been announced that are still coming?” I asked.

Braben smiled, then nodded and said, “There’s more.”

Power play and everything after

The latest Elite: Dangerous update adds a strategic element to the game that not every player has been excited about, and we asked Braben about how he sees Power Play affecting the general player base—and if he sees it as an optional or a mandatory component of the game.

“It’s not mandatory,” Braben said. “What Power Play is there for is for people who have really seen a lot of the game and who want to interact on a higher level, and that was lacking. Actually, personally,” he continued, “I would rather a new player not participate in Power Play… it’s already quite complicated! But then once you’ve gotten to that level and you’re really into the game, you can go, ‘oh wow, that’s really cool, I can take part in this!’”

Enlarge/ There were many Xbox consoles on display, along with this Rift-equipped PC.

“What we’re putting in is a feature with which people can choose to engage with, but you don’t have to,” he said. “The game is very similar to what it was before… but it doesn’t really impinge on you unless you choose to support a particular power or not.”

Several of the main occupations in Elite went through a re-balance with the latest major patch—mining and bounty hunting, in particular, with one becoming more profitable and one significantly less. We asked Braben about this rebalancing. “The trouble with any sort of balancing is that there will always be some people who will say, oh that’s terrible! When we launched the game, I think we got it slightly wrong, and the trading was the standard profession to do to get money—and it felt quite grind-y. So, bounty hunting was made better, and people found ways to make it very, very lucrative—more lucrative than we intended. We’re trying to make it with all of these things that you can do the profession that you most enjoy.”

I pointed out that there’s frequent contention online about the “right” way to play, be it casual or hard-core, and Braben agreed. “But there shouldn’t be a ‘right’ way,” he said. “You should do what makes you excited. I don’t want there to be a ‘right’ way, because then you’re not necessarily playing the way you want to play. And people have come up with lots of suggestions, some of them very constructive and sensible, and we do listen, and people hopefully have seen that we’ve changed things and adjusted things, but not in a way—we hope!—to upset people. We’re doing it to make the game better!”

We then ran down sort of a grab-bag of other questions. More ship decorations are coming, but there’s no word yet on custom paint jobs or decals—nor is there any word yet on being able to name your ship. There are no changes planned to separate solo and online saves, and players will continue to inhabit the same shared galaxy whether they’re in solo or multiplayer—again, continuing with Braben’s contention that there’s no ‘right’ way to play.

More standardized online gaming conventions like clans or formalized player organizations aren’t in the cards, at least not for the foreseeable future. VR support for headsets other than the Oculus Rift will be handled on a case-by-case basis, but Frontier believes very strongly in VR and definitely wants to go in that direction. And there aren’t any plans at this moment to expand beyond 32 players in each instance—but it’s always a possibility in the future.

As we wrapped, Braben wanted to reiterate that the CQC timed exclusive shouldn’t be considered a sign of a shift in priorities from Frontier, and that, in his words, “There are more exciting things coming to PC this year.”

Are one of those things the Elite universe’s big bad guys, the Thargoids? Braben gave us the same answer to that as he’s given us in the past: he smiled, paused a moment, and said, “They are coming.”

Correction: This piece originally said that "third-person walk-around-the-ship mode" was one of the upcoming features. This was a mistake by the author, who is suffering from E3-induced psychosis. No point-of-view was specified and what we know of the walk-around-the-ship mode remains consistent with the descriptions in the Elite: Dangerous design discussion forum. The piece has been updated and we regret the error.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com